**

Short, unadorned potboiler, written on the heels of James Dickey's Deliverance (1970), about three couples whose white water rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho is crashed by four violent escaped convicts.  Not in the least introspective, yet not hardboiled, either, as hero Jack Trahey intermittently wonders whether murderers and rapists deserve to die.  Reduced to two couples for a 1975 TV movie starring Vince Edwards (Ben Casey), Carol Lynley, Vic Morrow, and Neville Brand.

**

Dull, unengaging "thriller" about two viruses -- one bad, the other very bad -- that are stolen from a lab; the thief uses the first to demonstrate his power, saving the second to guarantee it.  Our hero, a former intelligence agent, is introduced as a potential traitor, then all that is forgotten as he tracks down the bad guy.  Director Sturges, eschewing close-ups, keeps the whole story at arm's length.  Based on the novel by Alistair MacLean (writing as Ian Stuart).

**

Yawner starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland, and William Baldwin attempts (half-heartedly and unsuccessfully) to make hay with the idea of an alien menace that thinks we humans are a virus that must be wiped out.  When Curtis and the others board a derelict Russian science vessel in international waters hoping to claim it as salvage, they quickly discover its many labs are being worked by an alien intelligence that is turning the former crew into deadly cyborgs with only slightly less personality than their own.  Routine mayhem ensues.  Based on a Dark Horse comic book.

*****

Psychologically disturbed woman commits one crime too many, ending up in a coerced marriage with a man who believes he can help her.  The basis for Alfred Hitchcock's film but with a significant difference in emphasis:  the book isn't about a man trying to tame a woman; it's about a woman discovering that she has a problem.  Written with humor and élan, Marnie emerges as one of the great women of genre fiction.  She's pathological yet utterly charming.  Marnie's crimes, however, are only one manifestation of her mental condition. The other is her detestation of men.  One leads to her marriage, the other threatens to destroy it.  It all plays out against a tense backdrop of jealousy, frustration, and intrigue.  Quite possibly the best book ever adapted by Hitchcock.

***

Lying brat ruins the lives of the two women who run her boarding school by accusing them of having a lesbian affair.  Sufficiently dramatic to hold interest, but too stagy (it was based on the Lillian Hellman play) to entirely work as a movie.  Indeed, every aspect of the film comes with its own theatrical caveat:  Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine turn in good, if somewhat mannered performances, the dialogue is apt and well-written, yet occasionally stilted, and so on.  It does, however, restore the specific lie and the ending of Hellman's play, both of which were changed when Wyler first filmed this story in 1936 as These Three.  This version, in spite of this, suffers by comparison to the much more cinematic original.  Young Veronica Cartwright, who plays bratty Karen Balkin's thieving classmate, is a bright spot.  Well-intentioned, but rather tame.

**

Sequel has same cast members as Poltergeist (with the exception of Dominique Dunne, the Freeling's teenage daughter, who was murdered only a few months after the release of the original film), but saddles them with an inane script that can't even get its story straight.  The spirits are back (although, despite assurances to the contrary, they aren't the same spirits), and they still want little Carol Ann (because she's so darn cute, presumably), and this time they're led by a 19th century Jim Jones who is so evil he has evidently become the Devil himself (making us all wonder what happened to the fellow who had the job for the last 2,000 years).  Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), the diminutive medium from the first film, is back also, helped this time by a Native American named Taylor (Will Sampson), whose ethnicity is meaningless:  it's not as if the mean spirits were Indians; perish the thought.  Taylor, however, seems to think the Freelings' survival depends this time on father Steve (Craig T. Nelson), but he should really have consulted with screenwriters Michael Grais and Mark Victor first, for they have other ideas -- several of them, in fact, and no desire to commit to any of them.  Nelson is the film's only bright spot.

**

In Mexico, several self-involved young men and women hike to the site of a "fabled archaeological dig" (a mine shaft at the top of hill) and fall prey to a scary vine.  Highly thought of horror novel might have been better if the characters, from whose various perspectives this story is told, weren't themselves the titular ruins or the subtext (the creeping decay of modern civilization) were more overt.  As it is, this is an unpleasant and terminally frustrating read.  Made into a film in 2008.